Renee at the White House

Renee's Garden was part of the Congressional Club's annual First Lady's Luncheon honoring Michelle Obama at the Washington Hilton last month.

This gala annual event, attended by Congressional, Supreme Court and Administration spouses as well as guests from around the country had a theme of "Forever Green", and event co-chair, Betty Ann Tanner, wife of the congressman from Tennessee, invited me to contribute our seeds for attendees. Individual packets of our Farmers Market lettuce and Pesto Basil were part of the beautiful gift bags given every attendee.
Best of all, I was invited to the VIP reception before the affair and had the thrill and honor of meeting Michelle Obama in person. I was also able to make a personal selection of our seeds to give to Michelle for the White House Garden. Michelle was everything I expected -- vibrant, graceful, clearly engaged and enjoying what she is doing. When you speak with her, you have her full attention and feel like you are the only person in the room. The luncheon itself was really fabulous. I was seated at a table quite close to the First Lady and other honorees, so I got to watch her "up close and personal" as she gave a very insightful speech on community service.

The First Lady also recently hosted a harvest party in the White House kitchen garden with the students from Bancroft Elementary to celebrate their hard work. Click here to read the blog post about it on the White House website. The kids harvested lettuce and sugar snap peas and then cooked a lunch from their harvest. More than 90 pounds of produce has been harvested so far from the White House kitchen garden.

Attract butterflies and hummingbirds to your garden – Our First Contest!

Although we love earthworms and bees here at Renee's Garden Seeds, there's nothing quite as exciting as catching a glimpse of a hummingbird zipping through your garden, looking for a snack. You can't deny the lift in your spirits when you watch a butterfly crash-land gently onto a bright “Red Sun” sunflower.

So, we thought. Why don't we share our winged friends with our readers?

Contest #1: A Blooming Butterfly and Hummingbird Garden Contest

For our first-ever contest on Renee's Blog, we want to offer each of our two contest winners a butterfly bonus pack and a hummingbird bonus pack. You can grow your very own butterfly and hummingbird gardens.

Here's what they look like:











These are both brand new for this season. Click here to read about these collections.

How does this contest work? This contest is open to our Canadian and US readers. You may enter once anytime before 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Friday, June 5th. The following week, we will select two responses at random, contact the winners, and send them each a butterfly garden and a hummingbird garden.

All you have to do is click on the "comments" link below this article. In the text box, tell us your favorite vegetable or flower and include your name and e-mail address so we contact you. After filling out the box, click the orange "publish your comment" button.

Two winners will be selected at random. The week of June 8th, we'll publish the winners' first names on the blog.


In Other News: Our New Intern!

Also new at Renee's Garden Seeds is Nellie Boonman, the marketing intern (me). I recently graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in Business Administration and Entrepreneurship.

I'm very excited to work with Renee and the entire team here in beautiful Felton, California. The trial gardens are absolutely bursting right now with lettuce and spinach, so everybody in the office goes home with bags of leafy greens in their back seats. Definitely a perk. I've especially enjoyed the Mesclun mixes, which you can order online through our catalog. They're incredibly tasty with an Orange Citrus Dressing and our chopped Delicious Duo scallions.

I'll contribute occasionally to the Renee's Garden Seeds blog, Twitter account, and to the Renee's Garden Seeds Ning community. I look forward to hearing your gardening stories and comments.

Lettuce Days: Fields of Green & Red

Recently we visited Lettuce Field Day at Shamrock Seeds, a premier lettuce breeding company. One of the benefits of our location in Central California is that several of the seed growers we work with are within easy driving distance. Shamrock Seeds hosted us during their “Lettuce Days” open house in their beautiful trial fields in Gilroy, CA.

We lucked out with a perfect spring weather for touring the "living catalog" of Shamrock varieties, existing and under development, with knowledgeable Product Development Manager, Estella Barajas. The trials featured row after row of interesting varieties – from romaines to baby leaf varieties to wasabi arugula. Estella impressed us with her encyclopedic and very precise knowledge of every single variety and her boundless enthusiasm for the details of growing and producing seed for great greens. She showed us how she evaluates the different varieties for form, weight, disease resistance and slow bolting. And taste of course! Renee makes a point of tasting each variety in the field, so we had plenty of opportunity to talk about the various nuances of flavor.

The most exciting find of the day was completely new variety of arugula that tastes amazingly like the spicy wasabi that often accompanies sushi. We didn’t believe it until we tasted it. The first taste is the spicy, peppery flavor of arugula, but then the intense flavor of wasabi hits you. It was a truly uncanny experience discover the tangy, delicious flavor of the wasabi in a salad leaf! We all agreed that there would definitely be a great interest in the market for this new green. It is still in development by Shamrock but we’ll be testing it in our own trial gardens this fall.

Many specialty lettuces also caught our attention, especially a soft, delicate butter lettuce they usually sell mostly to European customers, and the intensely colored red leaf lettuces and mustards that are Shamrock specialties.

On the theme that "everything old is new again", Shamrock has reselected an old home garden favorite, Little Gem lettuce. Renee was especially excited to see and taste both green and red varieties of these old-fashioned little vase- shaped lettuces that qualities of both butterhead and romaine lettuces. Shamrock's breeders have refined this variety to have more crunch, sweetness and heavier heads.

We also were excited about the densely leafed new variety Shamrock is working on called "thousand leaf lettuce." It is the most densely packed l head of leaf lettuce we've ever seen and tastes good too.

Next up will be for us to evaluate these new variety" finds" several times in our own company trials to see if they will perform well for home gardeners before deciding to add them to our Renee's Garden line. There will be many salad meals to come…

-by Sarah Renfro, Renee's Garden Business Manager

Springtime in Seattle - Sue Shecket, webmaster and NW trial gardener

It was an exceptionally long, rough winter here in the Pacific Northwest. We do expect a bit of snow to dust us now and then in Seattle, but this year was the "real deal" , with bitter cold and lots of the white stuff that stuck around for weeks. While we had some fun sledding down our very steep hillside streets, watching people cross country ski downtown, playing bumper cars on the side streets and bemoaning the inability of the city to plow anywhere but the mayor's neighborhood, the novelty wore off very soon and thoughts turned to the sad fate of our more tender plants and trees.

Indeed I did loose a few old favorites to the snow load and deep freeze, but fortunately there is a happy ending to this tale of woe, as the exceptional cold also gave new life to long ago planted and forgotten bulbs. So when spring bloom season finally arrived (and even our Tulip Festival was 2 weeks late), it was spectacular.

Against all odds, my fall planted sweet peas soldiered through and are up and running, and the early spring seeded poppies and larkspur also stayed afloat. I had sowed fava beans as a cover crop in the vegetable beds, and many plants did survive to be turned under and enrich the soil for my April planting of lettuces, greens, brocolli raab, bok choi, radishes, scallions, spinach, peas, chard, kale, carrots and beets.

The raised beds look a bit like a laundry line with row covers over everything to protect the seedlings from heavy rain, digging cats, hungry birds and murauding slugs and snails (an ongoing NW battle). I do start my warm weather crops indoors, and have a good supply of my favorite Sungold tomatoes to set out and share, as well as a sampling of our container varieties. Cherry tomatoes are more reliable in my less than ideal conditions (half day sun, cool nights), but I have had success here with our container eggplant and peppers, so have started Little Prince Eggplant and Baby Belle Peppers as well.

We are already looking forward to our first spring salads and I am, as ever, thrilled to see so many healthy seedlings sprouting in the beds. I'll be watching those nighttime temperatures closely with my seed packets out and ready for sowing lots of flowers and warmer weather crops.

We just published this month's Enewsletter - click to check it out: Add to your "garden ideas" toolbox.

From Seeds to Seedlings

Everyone from our Renee's Garden office staff went back to the trial garden last week to learn the next stage in growing the tomato and pepper seeds that we sowed last month.

In just over a month’s time, the seeds germinated and grew to several inches, kept sheltered, warm and well watered in the greenhouse by trial garden managers Lindsay and Mila.

Now it was time for us to learn the next step in the growing process –"pricking out" the seedlings, which we learned simply means moving the rapidly developing seedlings into larger size pots so they have room to grow and thrive.

Although the daytime temperatures have warmed up here in Northern California into the 60°F range, night temperatures are still not consistently high enough (in the 50°F range) to move our baby seedlings outside right away and they need to grow bigger in order ensure survival in the garden when it warms up enough.

The seed flats that we started the plants in have now become tight quarters for the vigorous seedlings and they need more room so they can grow into big healthy plants that will transplant easily into the garden when the weather permits.

So the next step is to transplant them into bigger individual 4” pots to continue growing strong roots, and then to gradually adjust them to the variable garden temperatures outside of the greenhouse.
Armed with our sophisticated tools (chopsticks from the take-out Chinese restaurant near our office), Lindsay showed us how to gently loosen the seedling from the flat by lifting the soil with the chopstick – never tugging or pulling on the plant itself.

We used the chopstick to lift and move the soil in the 4” inch pot, creating a hole with enough space for the roots and no more than about 1/4 inch of the seedling to be under the soil. Taking care to ensure the roots all point down, we gently transferred all the seedlings into their larger homes, tapping the pots on the table to settle the soil back around the seedling rather then pressing it down. We learned how important it is to keep the potting soil fluffy so the containers drain properly.

After finely misting water over the newly transplanted seedlings, they went back into the greenhouse to continue growing. Over the next several weeks, Lindsay and Mila will feed and water the growing plants and move the pots outside during the warm days to “harden off” or acclimate the seedlings to outside conditions. After the night temperatures are consistently above 50°F., we’ll be back to move our babies into their final homes in the ground.

All this planting got me in the mood to get my vegetable garden started at home over the weekend. Although it is still too early to plant the corn, cucumbers and melons, I did get crops of lettuce, radishes, spinach and arugula sown in my new raised beds. Keeping in mind everything I’ve learned so far from our trial gardening experience, I was careful to keep the soil fluffy and to properly space the seeds so they have room to grow.

I’ll be keeping a close watch on the beds over the next 2 weeks to see how everything germinates. Just about the time I’m enjoying my first salad of baby greens, it will be time to plant all those pepper and tomatoes and sow the warm weather crops I’ll be enjoying this fall!

-Sarah Renfro, Renee's Garden Business Manager

"Pack Trials" - a showcase of new varieties

Last week was the "Pack Trials" week throughout California. This is an annual event where all the American seed producing companies and many from abroad as well, grow out and showcase all their new flower varieties in greenhouse settings to introduce them to their customers and the media.There are several dozen locations to visit up and down the coast that have these official greenhouse open days and many folks spend a whole week traveling from one to another.

At our office, I take a group to visit some of our favorite vendors that are drivable in one day from Felton where we are located. It's always a fascinating tour with lots of plant material presented in their most alluring fashion given the constraints of greenhouse growing. We see both varieties that we are interested in trialing as well as lots of the varieties that will end up being massmarketed in the next two years by large growers.
Our job is to pick and choose what works best for our customers. Then we make a list, get sample seeds of all our choices and grow them out to see what we think of the varieties grown in our own trial garden from seed. For me, the best part of Pack Trials is not just seeing the flower varieties, but having time to spend with the breeders and developers of these new cultivars which I always find fascinating. Here are a few pictures:
Trial garden manager Lindsay admires the new " Fantasy" series of linaria from Japanese flower breeders Takii seeds . We decided to make a mix of all the pastel colors. Next up will be to grow them out from seed in both California and Vermont to see how they do.

Knowledgeable and delightful Elizabeth Sahin of the extraordinarily talented breeding company, Sahin Seeds , shows off her new fragrant dwarf stock to us. We thought it was very sweet smelling, but prefer the taller one we already sell from another company. She had many other great new selections though, including seed for Stevia, the sweet tasting herb which we will trial this spring and also a Korean mint whose edible flowers attract butterflies and taste like root beer.

Takii seeds product manager Jessica and I consider whether this dwarf red colored Zinnia in their "Dreamland" series is more crimson or scarlet in hue. In the end, I decided to try the whole lovely mix of colors!

Our East Coast trials manager, Jay Leshinsky, was visiting from still cold and snowy Vermont for this event and you can see him how pleased he is to be enjoying this comfortable warm greenhouse surrounded by gorgeous flowers.
My favorite seedsmen Sjaak Ros, from major Dutch supplier Kieft, seeds shows off their new Armeria to Lindsay. We love the color combination of brick and white and plan to try it from seed this spring. This perennial blooms the first year from seed and is extremely weather tolerant.

Beth Benjamin, major Renee's Garden inspiration and our horticultural advisor, and I enjoy the 5 foot tall snapdragon bred for single cuts -- these are very special and wouldn't grow this way at home gardens, but they are spectacular in this greenhouse setting.

The Renee's Garden crew each picked out their favorite new Viola cultivar for this picture and grabbed a sixpack from the display so we could memorialize the choices here for fun. There were about 30 different colors and forms to choose from!

Learning How to Sow Seeds

Guest post by Sarah Renfro, Renee’s Garden Business Manager

The office staff at Renee's Garden spent an afternoon in the garden last week learning how to sow seeds from our Lindsay and Mila, our Trial Gardeners, (with horse Ruby keeping us company in the background). Since our business office is located about 2 miles away from the trial garden, we here at the office don’t get as much “dirt” time as the trial garden staff.

Lindsay is organizing a series of educational sessions for our staff so we can be more confident and familiar with growing our seeds. Everyone in the office, including bookkeeper Cheri, order entry manager Calley, administrative assistant Heidi, customer service Susan and sales associate Kathy will be coming to the trial garden regularly. This week we learned more about the best techniques for seed starting. Some staff members are already experienced with starting seeds inside (Cheri’s husband is a chile pepper freak so she is very familiar!) but others are newbies.

This summer the trial garden will be evaluating many different types of tomatoes and peppers so this was the perfect opportunity for us to help out!

Mid-March is the time to start seeds of tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse. First we prepared trays with seed starting mix and watered the soil so it is damp but still fluffy. Then we laid out the seeds on top of the soil, about ¼” apart in a grid pattern. Finally we covered the seeds with a thin layer of vermiculite (being careful not to inhale this clay by-product) and gave the trays a gentle watering.

Between all of us we sowed over 500 tomato and pepper seeds! After they germinate and grow a couple of inches, we’ll head back to the greenhouse to transfer the seedlings into individual pots. In another month or so, it’s time to get dirty and plant everything into the ground.

We’ll all be taking home extra seedlings to try in our various home gardens. I am building brand new raised vegetables beds in my front yard this year (more on this in another blog post). Our newest staff member, Heidi will be growing the plants in containers on her deck. One thing is certain – we will all be enjoying the fruits of our labors later this summer!

Vegetables Rule!

Seed sales, particularly of vegetables and herbs, are up very sharply this season. After years of declining veggie seed sales the whole cycle has reversed and we are experiencing tremendous interest from a new generation of gardeners who want to, for the first time, start a garden to grow food.
What I hear about from customers is a combination of factors:
-with layoffs, and worry about job loss being out of the individual's control, the positive act of making a garden gives you the sense of taking some positive action to manage economic uncertainty and control your own future.
-starting a food garden is a way of dealing with the high price of food and the need to watch spending carefully, given the bleak economic outlook and the reality of many having less cash to spend at the market.
-Many new gardeners have a real interest in eating more nutritious food and an interest in having organic produce without having to spend a lot of money to do it. I also think The Food Network has had influenced its viewers to be interested in where their food comes from; TV personalities like Jamie Oliver, "The Naked Chef", are very successful media advocates of cooking from the garden. What a treat!
-there is growing interest in knowing where your food comes from and not having to worry about if it is safe and healthy, especially given recent food safety scares about peanuts, spinach, salad etc.
-I see a trend for younger families wanting to become more self-reliant and to live simpler lives. I think young mothers have new interest in seeing nutritious food as an important part of raising healthy kids. My "30 to 40 something" customers view gardening at a healthy low-cost way to spend good quality family time together.

I'm thrilled to see a new generation of gardeners get involved and get their hands dirty! We are an online catalog which gives us the opportunity to provide updated and interactive help on how to grow from seed, which is another area where these new gardeners want assistance.

The Renee's Garden Monthly E-newsletter we sent out in February included a good how-to article I wrote on Container Gardening from Seed and I hope it will be helpful for those who aren't sure how to go about getting great harvests from containers and small space gardens. Container growing is another trend that has increased almost exponentially in popularity

For March I've decided to feature sweetpeas, since we have two new ones this season and flowers are, after all, food for the soul! I've given three talks on sweetpeas lately up in the Northwest -- I'm so pleased at the interest in my favorite flower. Nothing matches the scent of sweetpeas nor has their perfume ever been replicated. A bouquet of fragrant sweet peas really does perfume an entire room. My mission is to convince gardeners who think they can't grow them to try them again -- or for the first time. It's a hard sell in some parts of the country, mostly because people don't realize they are cool season flower and need to be started extra early. I've been corresponding recently with great pleasure with Richard Parsons, head the British Royal Sweet Pea Society and it is such fun to chat with such a knowledgeable and respected font of knowledge on all things Sweet Pea. At his request, I sent him some of our newest variety, Zinfandel, and will look forward to hearing if he liked it as much is we have here.

Spring Prep and Seed Sourcing

Spring is just peeking over the horizon here at the trial garden, but signs of the new season are sharing time with much-needed torrential rains. During a break in last week's storms, I caught this quick snapshot of trial garden manager Lindsey happily bringing in the first big bundle of beautiful daffodils. Right now, late winter/early spring's reliable hellebores and dozens of jaunty daffodils that are beginning the spring season for us. I planted hundreds of daffodil varieties around our irrigation pond several seasons ago and am really beginning to reap the looming rewards. I look forward to the luxury of having armfuls of these bright beauties to enjoy and give away for the next several months. We will have a big vase of them to greet everyone who walks in the office starting next week.

Lindsay has been hard at work pruning our fruit trees and beginning to sow seeds in our greenhouse. Assistant trial garden manager Mila has, at long last, reluctantly decided to take out roses that are not disease-resistant and replace them with newer cultivars that just don't get the black spot and other rose diseases we have been plagued with in the landscape. Lindsay is going to turn her capable horticultural hands to grafting some new European pear varieties onto our vigorous Asian pear tree. We are planting yet another supposedly rain and cold tolerant apricot tree variety even though this will be our fifth attempt to grow apricots ; our cold nights and late, heavy rains make us less than ideal candidates for these delicious fruits. Trying yet another variety demonstrates once more how even experienced gardeners always try to push the envelope. Or simply that I am exceptionally stubborn and greedy for apricots!

Seed Sourcing:

Many of our customers are curious where we get our seeds. We offer varieties grown by seed producers both large and small, and early spring every year is when I work hard at finding new varieties and setting up growing contracts for the coming year for varieties we currently offer.

I have just returned from the annual conference of the American Seed Trade Association, held in Tampa, Florida this year. This meeting is my opportunity to sit down with many of the seed producers we work with, and it's especially important because our best European and Asian suppliers attend regularly. There's nothing like sitting down face-to-face with the folks who you ordinarily work with over long-distance most of the year.

I come prepared with a wish list of things we are looking for and unbounded enthusiasm, because I love to talk about seeds. I also try to be well prepared because I usually have ten meetings per day for three days straight and that takes some organization to make the most of each one.

I use my meetings first to review our trial garden results, because most of our suppliers really appreciate the feedback on how their varieties do in our trials. The main part of each meeting is devoted to hearing about and discussing their new introductions and individual variety suggestions for Renee's Garden.

These days, I get to see videos of plants growing in vendors' trials because everybody carries a laptop. I look forward to seeing my friends at our favorite French, English, Japanese, Italian and Dutch suppliers because I've known some of them for many years. They know the kinds of vegetables, herbs and flowers we'd like to offer at Renee's Garden, so I can count on their suggestions.

We also contract to buy seeds regularly from small organic farmers who have the expertise to grow high quality seeds for us. While these seed growers often don't travel to the Seed Association annual meeting, this is the time of year I contact them individually to see which crops they have room for and make formal agreements for growing out seeds we will need for next year. All our heirloom tomato varieties, for instance, are grown by these knowledgeable small seed producers, most located in the agricultural valleys of northern California and Oregon.

Generally the arrangement I make with them is that we supply the basic " stock seed", and they multiply these seeds for us, according to agreed on standards of germination and purity, subject to independent seed lab tests.

The Great Sunflower Project

Over the last week or so, I've been working to source good quality seeds and create sunflower growing instructions and graphics for The Great Sunflower Project. This fascinating and ambitious "citizen science" project was founded and is directed by Dr. Gretchen LeBuhn, a conservation biologist and associate professor at San Francisco State University. She is particularly interested in the effects of climate change on bee communities and this project is creating data to help understand what is happening to the bee pollinators in all the different bee species, focusing on urban and semi-urban areas.

Here's how Dr. LeBuhn describes the background of the project for participants:
"We know that pollinators are declining in certain wild and many agricultural landscapes. However, little is known about urban pollinators. Because natural habitats are uncommon in urban landscapes, they may not provide enough resources to support viable pollinator communities. However, if other habitats, such as urban gardens and restored areas, are sufficiently connected to natural habitat, then native populations may thrive.
By finding a way to track and value the goods and services provided by natural ecosystems, we will find a future in which conservation is not a luxury but a guiding principle of daily decision-making throughout the world. The data you collect from your sunflower will be a start. It will provide an insight into how our green spaces in the urban, suburban and rural landscapes are connected as well as shedding light on how to help pollinators. The Great Sunflower Project is the first step."
The Project works by sending a sunflower seed packet to all the individual volunteers who sign up on The Great Sunflower Website to get one and agree to collect data on the bees attracted by the flowers. I'm pleased and proud to have been selected to write the packet to ensure growing success and provide the sunflower seeds for The Sunflower Project' s 2009 seed packet. When the these seeds are sown, grow and flower, the volunteers will be observing and reporting on the bees that visit them, using standardized data sheets that are then sent back to the Project for analysis.
Currently, 40,000 American and Canadian volunteers ranging from preschoolers to master gardeners and from rural, suburban and metropolitan locations are participating.
With the help of her students Fern Canton and Shannon Messerly, Dr. LeBuhn is looking forward to getting a wide range of data about urban bee populations that would not otherwise be available: "We have grown a ‘virtual’ community of teachers, community gardeners, nature center staff, beekeepers, pollinator enthusiasts, retirees, home schooling groups and parents interested in participating in a project with their children. If everyone plants seeds this year, we will have sunflower samples from the Arctic Circle to the tip of Florida and west to Hawaii and east to Puerto Rico!"

You can see a map with about 25,000 of the locations on the Great Sunflower Project Website http://www.greatsunflower.org/

Last year, the project had the misfortune to use a sunflower species from another seed company that didn't germinate at all well and was very disappointing. This season, Dr. LeBuhn came to me looking for a sunflower that was produces pollen, has multiple flower heads and was easy to grow and attractive. I settled on a wonderful old-fashioned variety called "Lemon Queen" and have written the packet back expressly for beginning gardeners since many of the folks who are participating in the project haven't had much garden experience. Today I finally sent the packets off to the printer to start things rolling and ordered the seeds to be shipped for filling the packets once they are produced.

In addition to personally contributing in building an important database about bees, participants can really learn about both honey bees and lesser-known native species. Besides, it's really fun to be part of a big effort like this! I'd like to encourage everybody to go to their website and sign up to do this project! We will plan to have a great big row of Lemon Queen in our trial gardens this year. This is an interesting and serendipitous way to find a new variety, but if all goes well, we'll probably also add Lemon Queen to Renee's Garden in 2010.

New Year's celebration and salad

Here is my New Year's portrait -- I expect it needs a little explaination: I belong to a group of 10 friends who have been getting together to celebrate New Year's Eve together at each other's houses for at least the last decade or so.
We have a fine dinner together and then spend the evening playing everyone's favorite board games and occasionally, even old-fashioned ones like charades. (My favorite!) Our website photographer Karen and her husband Bob are part of the group and instituted a costume theme every year because that gives them an excuse to take pictures of everyone.

This year the theme was masks and I'm afraid mine was the least elaborate and store-bought at the last minute. My only excuse is that I don't consider myself particularly artistic or crafty -- but I'm fortunate that many of my friends have both of those talents, and their masks were homemade and really fun. Here are a few of my favorites taken by photographer Kevin Osborn.

As always, I brought the salad for our meal. Despite the fact that we've had lots of frost with temperatures well below freezing at night, my lettuce beds are in a protected spot and my Blush Batavian lettuces and Escarole look great and are especially crisp. I also have the most incredible deep, deep dark red new lettuce variety that I will be introducing next year. I really want to call it "Blood Lust” - but I think that might be a little over the top. Maybe "Passion" would do. We'll be growing it again in spring, so I'll see what inspires me then.

In a large stainless steel bowl I bought from the restaurant supply, I combined 2 heads of the light green and deep green leaves with 2 heads of the gorgeous deep red ones. Then I put in a hefty handful of finely chopped chives and approx. 2 cups of chopped Italian plain leaf parsley from the garden (the cold weather really makes the parsley sweet , it's SO good for you). From the store, I had a long English cucumber to slice thinly into the bowl and then peeled and cut 2 blood oranges and 2 regular Navel oranges into small 2 inch chunks. Finally, I added about 2 1/2 cups of freshly toasted walnut pieces and sprinkled 2 pomegranates' yields of ruby- colored sweet/ tart pomegranate seeds over the top. This New Year's salad was as colorful as the holiday, tasted seasonally perfect and served 10 big eaters comfortably.

I can recommend my standard homemade vinaigrette to go with it: 3/4 of a cup of good-quality, fruity extra virgin olive oil, 1/4 cup (not too sweet) good quality balsamic or unseasoned rice vinegar, 3/4 teaspoon Dijon mustard, 1 smashed garlic clove, a good pinch of salt, 1/2 teaspoon sugar and several good grindings of fresh pepper. This time, I also added approx. 1/3 cup of fresh orange juice and a little orange zest. Cover container and shake well and allow to blend for at least 15 minutes at room temperature. Freshly made vinaigrette is so much better than any kind of bottled dressing that once you try it you won't go back.

Last post, I profiled three of my favorite things to give his garden gifts but I forgot to mention one of my favorite garden supplies catalog companies - Gardeners Supply Company (http://www.gardeners.com/). It’s important to know about if you don't have a good source of seed starting supplies anywhere nearby or aren't sure what's available. They carry a variety of all the critical equipment needed (as well as all kinds of gadgets) for folks who garden from seed. I particularly recommend looking at their indoor seed starting equipment which is often hard to find. They've been in business a good long time and know their stuff. If you ever are in Burlington, Vermont, they have a great retail store there as well.

This company was started by Will Rapp, I think in the mid-80s. When I first was getting started in the catalog business, I called him up out of the blue (he was on a different side of the country and didn't have any idea of who the voice on the other end of the phone was) and asked for his help in how to design and mail catalogs effectively. He was most generous with excellent advice and played an important role in getting me started. I have always been very grateful to him and had a soft spot for his business.

Will has also been instrumental in developing many innovative demonstration projects in ecological farming and gardening in the area next to his business. One of the most fascinating I remember seeing at his location in Burlington was a demonstration of how energy can be derived from methane produced by dairy cows!